a blogzine of investigative, exploratory, avant-garde, innovative poetry and poetics edited by Robert Sheppard

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Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Robert Sheppard: The Meaning of Form: From the Temporal to the Spatial (and Kamau Brathwaite)

I was writing about

the gradual re-forming of many contemporary
forms of poetry from the temporal axis to the spatial axis. The ubiquity and
ease of new technologies has made the visual disposition of text simpler to
manipulate, to create complex effects, and there is a growth in ‘visual poetry’
that seems to owe little to classic concrete poetry. Attridge says such poems
‘use spatial arrangement to create effects in part by resisting the expectation that poems occur in time,’ which might be
a formal shift of some consequence. (Attridge 2004: 72)

And later I find myself writing this analogous passage:

But perhaps
the future lies elsewhere, in the example of Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite’s
combination of his rooted ‘nation language’ with his deconstructions of page
and screen in what he calls his ‘Sycorax Video Style’, which, deliberately
‘anti-elegant in shape’, in the words of Joyelle McSweeney, presents ‘an array
of pumped-up lo-fi typefaces’. (MacSweeney 2013: np) Often re-moding his
earlier poems, he escapes received pronunciation and the decorum of British ex-
and neo-colonialist speech and language, as well as breaking the formal bounds
of the equally imperial iambic pentameter, by adopting the visual aspects of
word-processing (this being another shift from the temporal to the spatial in
contemporary poetics, as noted earlier with reference to visual innovative
sonnets).